Olympic scene: reform plans, fairy tales and more

Stuff happens. A lot isn't by itself enough to justify its own column. Here goes a collection of stuff:

— From the department of decoding news releases:

The International Olympic Committee president, Thomas Bach, and the World Anti-Doping Agency president, Sir Craig Reedie, held a meeting Monday at IOC headquarters in Lausanne, Switzerland, after which the IOC issued a statement that included remarks from both men. From Bach: “There was a very positive atmosphere in our meeting today, and I am very happy that any perceived misunderstandings could be clarified. We agreed to continue to work closely together to strengthen the fight against doping under the leadership of WADA.”

Translation: Consider this a real step forward because it looks like WADA has been asked to drive how doping reform gets delivered.

— News: IAAF enacts wide-ranging reform plan at Saturday vote in Monaco. The count: 182-10.

The IAAF reform vote may have looked like an election result from the Communist days, with 95 percent in favor, but reality is that what the vote does is give IAAF president Seb Coe time and some structure to begin what is sure to be a lengthy, arduous and contentious process of reform.

The IAAF amounts to a classic business-school case — better, a book waiting to be told — about how to rip up one structure, the president-as-unchallengeable-king model by which the federation was run for more than 30 years, and replace it with a 21st century model featuring a president, an empowered chief executive officer and more. Change is never easy, no matter the scene, and it won’t come easily to the IAAF.

— How do you know change is going to be a slog? Because of the finest part of the IAAF meeting: the moment when the delegates realized that, yes, their votes were going to be made public and they were going to be accountable for pushing the electronic vote-system button. Yikes!

Even better: Ukraine abstaining. Home of Sergei Bubka, whom Coe defeated in 2015 for the IAAF presidency. Senegal abstaining. Home of Lamine Diack, the former IAAF president, now under criminal investigation in France. Jamaica abstaining? Seriously? When anyone with an ounce of common sense knows that doping protocols in Jamaica have over the years been, at best, lackluster? If you were a Jamaican representative to some IAAF commission or another, please consider handing in a resignation letter, and pronto. Before you get, and appropriately, kicked off.

— For the history books:

Coe at one point before the vote made like Winston Churchill or something, declaring, “The greatest symbol of hope for our future is the civilized discourse we have had, its firmness of purpose and its sense of justice.”

— That 95 percent vote? That is in large part due to Coe’s political skills. He knows how to close a deal. He also knows how to delegate his proxies, chiefly among them the American delegate Stephanie Hightower. He, she and others were working it, and hard, at the IAAF gala Friday night before Saturday’s vote.

Looking ahead: the IAAF is now mandated to have female vice presidents: at least one by 2019, two by 2027. In this context, it is worth remembering the — use whatever descriptive you want — observation of the-then IAAF vice president Bob Hersh at a public USA Track & Field board meeting not so long ago that it was unlikely a woman could be elected an IAAF vice president. He also said, “We need a seat on the executive board and I have a better chance of getting that seat than Stephanie and by a large, large margin.” As ever, time reveals all things. At the IAAF elections in 2015, Hightower was elected to the council as the highest vote getter for one of six seats designated to be filled by women. She got 163; next best, Nawal el Moutawakel of Morocco, an IAAF council member for 20 years and IOC member since 1998, with 160.

— It’s also worth recalling all the senseless outrage that attended the USATF board decision to put forward Hightower, not Hersh. The time is now for Mr. Hersh, as well as all the complainers, and in particular those in the media who gave undue weight to those complaints, to apologize — to say to Stephanie Hightower, hey, sorry, we were dead-on wrong.

Let’s review:

"But I do know that at this meeting she was full of shit, so that’s not a good start. She completely disregarded the wishes of the people she is meant to represent. She did not lose honorably" -- Lauren Fleshman in a post on her blog about the December 2014 USATF annual meeting, referring to Hightower.

For emphasis, more from Ms. Fleshman:

https://twitter.com/laurenfleshman/status/541051730016743424

So over the weekend Ms. Fleshman was voted onto the USATF board, as an athlete advisory committee member. Congrats to her. Maybe while on the board she will find renewed purpose in collegiality and an understanding that perhaps things aren't always as black and white, and given to outrage on Twitter, as they might seem.

Then there was this, from the distance runner David Torrence, part of a lengthy message string he put out on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/David_Torrence/status/541045226408665088

This would be the same David Torrence who ran for Peru in the 5000 meters at the Rio Olympics rather than take his chances at the U.S. Olympic Trials. In Rio, Torrence finished 15th. Behind three Americans, among them silver medalist Paul Chelimo.

As this space has advocated on many occasions, the level of civility in and around USATF needs to be ratcheted way up and the volume on complaints turned way down. This episode — Hightower and Hersh — offers compelling evidence why, and on both counts, civility and volume.  It's just way better policy for everyone to talk to and with each other instead of resorting to insults or epithets. As Coe put it: "civilized discourse."

— Mr. IOC President, please institute an IAAF-style transparent vote system for the bid-city balloting, and do so in time for the 2024 Summer Games election next Sept. 13 in Lima, Peru.

Otherwise, despite your assertions that the IOC’s own reform package, Agenda 2020 (approved by the members in December 2014, also in Monaco), is indeed meaningful, reality suggests its impact is minimal, and particularly if it can't own up to the acid test. What good is purported "reform" if  the most important election in the IOC system is consistently underpinned by a culture and protocols in which everyone lies, cheerfully, to everyone else, knowing there’s zero accountability?

— The IOC president, meanwhile, is now on record as saying that without Agenda 2020 there would have been no, zero, bids for 2024. This is absurd. Los Angeles, Paris and Budapest would all still gladly be bidding.

A skeptic might say: five cities started the 2024 race and, amid Agenda 2020, only three remain.

Hamburg’s voters turned down a bid. Rome is now out, too.

Meanwhile, a Tokyo government panel has said costs for the 2020 Games may exceed $30 billion, roughly four times the bid projection, unless cuts are made. At a conference last week, the IOC declined to sign off on a $20 billion Tokyo 2020 budget, seeking a lower number.

— Both Etienne Thobois and Nick Varley were key players in Tokyo’s winning 2020 bid. Nick was the 2020 messaging guy. Etienne served on the IOC’s evaluation team for 2016 — a race in which Tokyo came up short — before switching to the bid side and being involved on behalf of the winning Tokyo 2020 project in many key elements, including the bid’s finances and budgets.

Both now serve in key roles for the Paris 2024 campaign. Varley is playing a significant role in seeking to craft a winning Paris 2024 message. Thobois is the bid’s chief executive officer.

Here is where things get awkward.

Tokyo’s bid was centered on a plan to keep most of the competition venues within five miles of the athletes’ village. Confronted with spiraling costs, the organizing committee has since done a massive re-think, and several venues may now well move outside the city.

Thobois, in a story reported a couple days ago by the Japan Times, said this:

“I think Tokyo tried to win the Games at a time when Agenda 2020 was more or less not there. So you were trying to build some kind of fairy tale.”

What?! Fairy tale?! Seriously?

He went on:

“That concept that everything was within eight kilometers was leaning into a lot of constructions, and venues that turned out not to be needed. In our case it’s very different. So the delivery model is definitely very different and I don’t think you can compare the two situations.”

Actually, yes you can. And it’s illogical not to do so. The two guys who played leading roles in selling a “fairy tale” three-plus years ago are now trying to sell — what?

“We are talking about $3 billion for the Games, infrastructure-wise,” Thobois also said about the Paris 2024 bid, according to the Japan Times, “which is very modest.” The Paris budget proposal: $3.4 billion for operations, $3.2 for infrastructure.

Who can believe those figures? If so, why?

—

There’s also this, from a lengthy November 2013 Q&A with both Varley and Thobois, Etienne observing about the winning 2020 vote:

“Tokyo were able to secure some really heavyweight, influential votes — to me that was the key. Once you secure those big leaders, those influential voters within the IOC, then things start going your way quite quickly. [Olympic Council of Asia president Sheikh Ahmad al-Fahad] al-Sabah is obviously a very influential vote to get, but on the doping issue a guy like Lamine Diack, president of arguably the biggest federation [the IAAF], quite a senior, well-respected figure, and he was clearly supporting the Tokyo bid and that was a very strong asset. There were others like that, too.”

Uh-oh.

Again on Diack, that "senior, well-respected figure":

Diack is now the target of a French criminal investigation, and primarily because of “the doping issue.” The authorities allege that as IAAF president he ran a closely held conspiracy designed to, among other things, collect millions of dollars in illicit payments in exchange for making Russian doping cases go away.

—

Another thought on Paris 2024:

If you asked someone, hey, do you want to go to Paris for, say, the weekend, the answer would of course be yes. Who wouldn’t? Look, I had one of the most glorious summers of my life there, as a student in the 1980s. But in the bid context, that’s not the central question. It’s, do you want to go to Paris and turn over your life — oh, and by the way, the future of the Olympic franchise — to the French authorities for 17 days? Answer away. No fairy tales, please.

—

Last Friday, the LA2024 bid committee released a new budget plan. It’s $5.3 billion with no surplus and a $491.9 million contingency.

Easy math: $5.3 billion is roughly one-tenth the figure associated with the Sochi 2014 Games. It’s maybe a quarter of what may be on tap in Tokyo.

A first pass at the LA 2024 budget, prepared in the summer of 2015, called for a $161 million “surplus.” That is Olympic talk for “profit.”

Let’s be real. Even if the bid committee can't and won't say so, any Games in Los Angeles is going to make a boatload of money. The only thing that needs to be built is a canoe venue. Everything else already exists; this means infrastructure costs would be super-minimal. The 1984 Games made $232.5 million. The last Summer Games in the United States was 1996. Economics 101: there’s huge demand, especially from corporate sponsors, and the supply has been cut off for going on 20 years now.

Further, California is now the world’s sixth-largest economy, with a gross state product of $2.5 trillion in 2015 — up 4.1 percent, when adjusted for inflation, from 2014. In August, California added 63,000 new jobs — that represents a whopping 42 percent of new jobs added in the entire United States.

This new pass at the budget eliminates the $161 million surplus. It throws all of it into “contingency.”

Now some first-rate analysis from Rich Perelman. Rich’s background in Olympic stuff goes back a long way. In 1984, for instance, he ran press operations at the Los Angeles Olympics; he then served as editor of the Games’ official report. This summer, he launched a newsletter called the Sports Examiner. In Monday’s edition, he offered this take on the LA 2024 plan:

“This is incredibly smart for several reasons. First, it eliminates any plans by outside groups to spend that surplus in 2025 and beyond before it is earned. Second, a zero-surplus budget looks good to the State of California, which has guaranteed to pick up any deficit of up to $250 million at the end of the Games. Third, having no announced surplus allows a clever organizing committee leadership to leverage the need to keep expenses down and obtain maximum outside support from both the private and public sectors in the run-up to the Games.”

—

Flashback to the SportAccord convention in Sochi in 2015. Then then-president of the organization, the International Judo Federation president Marius Vizer, called the IOC system “expired, outdated, wrong, unfair and not at all transparent.”

Bach’s IOC proxies, led by Diack, mounted a furious response, and Vizer resigned from the SportAccord job about six weeks later.

Vizer, as many have since said quietly, was 100 percent right. And Diack now?

The anti-doping system currently allows athletes to use otherwise-banned products with a doctor’s note and official approval. That approval is called a TUE,  a therapeutic use exemption. The Fancy Bears hack suggests TUE use has been exploited if not manipulated.

Speaking to the British website Inside the Games amid the weekend Tokyo judo Grand Slam, Vizer suggested a novel approach to athlete TUE use — if you have one, you can’t compete.

“My opinion,” he said, “is that those athletes which are using different therapies should not be accepted into official competition during the effect of these products.”

Vizer’s comment is significant for any number of reasons. Here’s the most important collection: he’s almost always right, he isn’t afraid to speak out and, unlike many who just complain, he is consistently in search of and willing to suggest solutions.

—

News item: American and other athletes weigh boycott of 2017 world bobsled and skeleton championships set for Sochi.

Responses:

1. William Scherr, a key player in Chicago’s 2016 bid, said this the other day on Facebook, speaking generally about the Olympics, and it’s spot-on:

“The Olympics are the only time where the world gathers together, puts aside differences and celebrates those things that make us similar. We learn about people and cultures that we otherwise would never know, and we learn that despite being separated by distance, ethnicity and beliefs that we run, fight, swim and jump the same way.”

A boycott is just dumb. History has shown that the only people a boycott hurts are athletes. Those athletes weighing their 2017 worlds options might want to consider history.

2. No matter the context, neither sanctimonious righteousness nor rush to judgment rarely make for a winning play. If the Americans, for instance, think that doping is only going on in Russia — that’s funny. If the Americans, for instance, think that there is no link in many minds elsewhere between, on the one hand, Lance Armstrong, Marion Jones and many more and, on the other, U.S. sports success — that’s funny. That we in the United States might go, wait, the allegation is that in Russia it was state-supported — that’s a distinction that in a lot of places many would find curious. The fact is, we don’t have a state ministry of sport in the United States. So of course world-class cheating would be undertaken in the spirit of private enterprise.

3. The allegations involving the Russian system are extremely serious, and the report due out Friday from Canadian law professor Richard McLaren, with yet more accusation, is likely to be even more inflammatory. But accusation without a formal testing of the evidence is just that — accusation. All the Americans claiming the moral high ground right now — if you were accused of something, wouldn’t you want the matter to be tested in a formal setting, meaning in particular by cross-examination? Let’s just see, for instance, what comes out — whether Friday, before or after — about the credibility of Grigoriy Rodchenkov, the former Russian lab director now living in the United States.

IAAF, and an open vote for reform

MONACO — Transparency. What a concept.

The reform plan put forward by International Assn. of Athletics Federation president Seb Coe, so overdue, is full of common sense. It’s just the thing to start moving track and field, in particular its long-convoluted governance structure, ahead in the 21st century. "Transparency sits at the heart of everything we've been talking about," Coe would say late Saturday.

Like, for instance, an open vote. In which every yes, no and abstention was not just tallied but shown up on the big screen Saturday at a special IAAF congress held here in a ballroom at the seaside Fairmont Hotel.

Take note, International Olympic Committee and others. Transparency surely changes the way you approach the whole voting thing.

Thanks to an open vote and Coe's political skills, the IAAF reform package passed, 182-10, a "ringing endorsement of our commitment to do things differently," he said afterward but one that now -- given the backstage drama that attended the run-up to the balloting and, despite the landslide, remains very much a vital part of the IAAF scene -- raises the pressing question of real-life implementation.

Coe now has authority and real room to maneuver. But don't anyone be fooled that it will all be roses and sunshine.

The former IAAF president, Lamine Diack? From Senegal. Senegal, as was made plain because the ballots were transparently on display, abstained in Saturday's voting.

The runner-up in the 2015 election that made Coe president, Sergei Bubka? From Ukraine. Ukraine abstained.

"We made a decision today but it will be very important to fulfill that with real life," German delegate Dagmar Freitag observed after the vote. "Work begins today."

It actually began months ago, after last Christmas, and culminated late Friday, amid the IAAF awards ceremony, where word was the reform package’s fate remained highly uncertain.

Why is easy to explain:

Big-picture reform? Check. The sport's future on the line? Check. But what about the import of reform on matters such as personal agendas, perks of membership and, of course, individual advancement?

Translation, and cutting right to the core of the thing: what’s in it for me?

This of course is what drives critics of international sport — where considerable lip service is paid to the notion of athletes at the core of the enterprise — up the wall.

Maybe rightly so.

But it also is what it is, and to ignore that reality is unquestionably naïve.

Naïveté is not a helpful thing in the context of IAAF politics and culture. Particularly in 2016.

Track and field arrived at Saturdays moment after a grim 16 months. That's how long Coe has been president.

It was always clear that Diack, president from 1999 until 2015, ran the IAAF as his personal fiefdom — a model he learned from the president before him, Italy’s Primo Nebiolo.

What had been hidden, and for obvious reasons, according to accusations from the French authorities, is that Diack ran a closely held conspiracy — involving just a few senior officials — that aimed, among other things, to collect illicit payments in exchange for hiding certain Russian doping matters.

As for Russian doping — the IAAF banned the Russian track and field team from the 2016 Rio Games in the aftermath of allegations of state-sanctioned doping. A second report on the matter from Canadian law professor Richard McLaren report is due to be made public Friday.

If ever a sport and a situation were ripe for reform, this would seem to be the moment. Right?

As Usain Bolt said Friday, "I know Seb Coe is trying to make track and field more transparent so everyone can see what's happening, so one person is not pulling control. That's a bold move for him, a bold move for the IAAF president."

As Coe himself said in Saturday's opening remarks, “The walls of the organization were too high to see over and too much power rested in the hands of too few people,” adding, “We should have known more.”

He asserted, “We can not let this happen again,” adding, “It’s bad enough that any of this happened. But it can not happen for a second time. Not on our watch or anyone else’s watch."

In general, the IAAF proposal sketches out four areas of focus:

1. Independent anti-doping, integrity and disciplinary functions, the idea to launch an integrity unit in April 2017

2. A better gender balance

3. A bigger voice for athletes

4. A redefinition of roles and responsibilities for each national federation with the concurrent idea of strengthening what in IAAF terms is called “area representation,” broadly speaking the continents.

The proposal further suggested that IAAF business decisions be delegated to an executive board that would meet regularly, roughly once a month. The IAAF council would set policy. The congress, with a registry of more than 200 national representatives, would continue to be the federation’s “supreme authority,”meeting annually.

The idea, per the working paper, was to cast one vote Saturday on the adoption of two — count them, two — constitutions. One set of rules would take effect in 2017, the other in 2019. The 2017 plan revolved mostly around the integrity plank. The rest — a new structure for vice presidents, council and executive board — would take effect in 2019.

As Coe put it in the forward to the working paper, “Now is the time for change. The time to rebuild our organization for the next generation. To be the change we want to see.”

Svein Arne Hansen, president of the European Athletics Federations, wrote in a statement posted to the federation’s website: “To be clear, our sport’s reputation has already been damaged and failure to pass these reforms will do further damage in the eyes of the public, with governments and with partners in ways we can only imagine at this time. It will hurt the federations and it will hurt the athletes at all levels.”

That elicited on Twitter this response from Paula Radcliffe, the British marathon standout:

https://twitter.com/paulajradcliffe/status/804734851635093504

In remarks that helped to open Saturday’s session, Haile Gebrselassie, the distance champion who is now head of the Ethiopian track and field federation, said, “Billions of people around the world, they have to trust us.”

Echoed Andreas Thorkildsen, the Norwegian javelin champion: “It’s transparency and trust — what I believe is very important for us going forward.”

A few moments before, Prince Albert of Monaco had told the audience, “Today is a pivotal moment for the future of athletics,” meaning track and field, “and the hopes and dreams of clean athletes worldwide.”

The prince added, “Sport has the unique capacity to transcend borders, to build bridges between populations, to ease tensions within societies. We all need to make sure it remains a force for good a beacon of hope for generations to come. We need to rebuild this trust.”

All this uplifting stuff. All this excellent theater. All good.

Now let’s talk straight.

“Today is the day we must bury our own interests for the greater good — to do what is right,” the chair of the IAAF athletes’ commission, Rozle Prezelj of Slovenia, said.

As always, the devil lurks in the details, and in the difference between theory and practice.

Coe acknowledged from the head table that he had gotten pushback before the meeting about bringing in new people and new teams, including chief executive Olivier Gers. Referring to the clear concern underpinning that pushback, was it because “I want to ditch responsibility?”

He answered the rhetorical question: “Simply not true. Given the year that our sport and I personally have gone through, I hope all of you in this room will agree that is ridiculous,” even though obviously some in the room had been the ones making that “ridiculous’ suggestion and such pushback  revealed the concern if not fear of moving from president-as-king governance structure that had long held at the IAAF.

That gender balance thing:

The IOC has for years pushed those in the Olympic movement to not just promote but welcome women at executive and leadership positions.

Progress has been halting.

The IAAF proposal perfectly illustrates why.

It calls for the number of vice presidents to stay at four with the proviso that by 2019 there be one of each gender and by 2027 two of each.

Let’s say you were one of the four men currently holding a vice-presidential seat. How inclined would you be to robustly agree to such a proposition if such agreement put you at serious risk of losing your position?

And what about section 3.6 in the proposals, relating once more to those vice presidents. It says a vice president can’t simultaneously serve as an area president.

Such “interlocking directorates” have long been a mainstay of Olympic sport despite the potential for conflict of interest, the rationale behind 3.6. It’s nonetheless easy to see why, in real life, such a change would mean a significant diminishment of authority and influence for someone who might currently occupy both spots.

As for the image of the sport and the ability to instill trust:

In theory, very few dispute the notion that stuff failing the smell test shouldn’t happen.

In practice, however, what smells in one part of the world maybe doesn’t in another.

For instance, explain this, and it’s not like it’s a secret, because anyone can read all about it right there on the internet:

The Assn. of Balkan Athletics Federations is a thing. It has 17 members. From, mostly, the Balkans — you know, the likes of Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Montenegro.

So why was the “6th Balkan Athletics Gala,” according to the internet, held Nov. 19 in that bastion of Balkan-ness, Dubai?

Where the presidents and general secretaries of those member federations were invited to “share the excitement of the glorious moments”?

Hypothetically: what if a key player in Dubai had regional if not global ambitions? Would such a person stand to gain influence with some number of potential voters by inviting them out of the chill of the autumnal Balkans down to sunny Dubai?

Oh, the currents -- and thus the genuine concern from many of the reform-minded on Friday night.

The IAAF, meanwhile, made life all the more difficult for itself Saturday by insisting on what per the rules was called a “special majority” to enact its reforms — in essence, a two-thirds majority.

In all, 197 delegates (up from an initial count of 196) were on hand. Two-thirds meant 132 (if no abstentions).

A test question highlighted the obstacles: are you happy to be in Monaco? 177 said yes, 17 no, a couple had no opinion. Seventeen people were not happy to be on an expenses-paid trip to one of the world’s fanciest destinations? A second run-through of the test question, after the number of delegates was fixed at 197, gave these results: 156-37, 81 percent to 19 percent, with four abstentions.

Later, the Portuguese representative observed that such transparency was highly unusual at a sports function, and that many delegates had taken a cellphone picture of the results up there on that big screen. Would the real votes be displayed as well?

Yes, Gers said.

“For those who don’t want the vote to be transparent: make the right choice,” Radcliffe said from the floor, her hands quivering with emotion as she clutched the microphone.

In the end, that very transparency unquestionably helped seal the deal. No question by Saturday morning the Coe political operation meant the package would have passed the two-thirds threshold. But, also unquestionably, there would have been considerably more no votes. It’s another for everyone in the “family” — as that word was used many times in the 42 pre-vote floor comments — to talk the talk. It's quite another to see a very public “no” vote on a matter of such import.

No votes came from, among others, Saudi Arabia and Thailand.

Immediately after, Bobby McFerrin came on the audio feed: “Don’t worry. Be happy.”

Another choice might well have been Johnny Nash's 1972 No. 1 hit -- or if you prefer, the 1993 Jimmy Cliff version on the soundtrack of the Jamaican bobsled flick Cool Runnings. It famously proclaims, "I can see clearly now."

Next votes. Because there are plenty yet to come.

"Look," Coe said in a post-vote news conference, "I hope the public perception of our sport is helped by what they’ve seen today but that isn’t primarily why we did it. We did it because we were in need of change."

Sebastian Coe is the answer, not the problem

If you have seen Fight Club, the 1999 movie with Brad Pitt and Edward Norton (New York Times: “surely the defining cult movie of our time”), or, better yet, read the 1996 Chuck Palahniuk novel that inspired it, you know the elemental first rule of Fight Club: you do not talk about Fight Club.

This is the key to understanding what happened at track and field’s international governing body, the IAAF, in regards to doping in Russia (mostly) and cover-ups, and as a spur going forward, because institutional, governance and cultural changes must be enacted to ensure that what happened under the watch of the former IAAF president, Lamine Diack, can never happen again.

It’s also fundamental in understanding why Sebastian Coe, elected IAAF president last August, is the right man for the reform job.

He’s not going to resign. Nor should he.

To be clear:

We live in a 24/7 world where, increasingly, everything seemingly must be susceptible to immediate resolution.

Regrettably, far too often this jump-starts a rush to judgment.

A powerful driver in this cable-TV, talking-head world, the noise amplified by social media, is protest and moral arousal, as the New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman wrote in his column Wednesday.

Quoting the leadership expert Dov Seidman, Friedman writes that when moral arousal manifests as moral outrage, “it can either inspire or repress a serious conversation or the truth.”

More from Seidman: “If moral outrage, as justified as it may be, is followed immediately by demands for firings or resignations, it can result in a vicious cycle of moral outrage being met with equal outrage, as opposed to a virtuous cycle of dialogue and the hard work of forging real understanding and enduring agreements.”

Coe is the only person in track and field capable of leading, driving and instituting the change that must now be effected.

Any suggestion that the sport ought to be led instead by an outsider is misplaced, and seriously.

Sport entities carry their own distinct cultures, and failure to appreciate, to understand and to be able to move within those cultures is a recipe for disaster.

Evidence: the U.S. Olympic Committee’s turn seven years ago to outsider Stephanie Streeter as chief executive. That ended within months.

To the point at hand: Coe is not accused of any misconduct or wrongdoing. He was legitimately elected. It’s time to get to the “hard work of forging real understanding and enduring agreements.”

In a report made public Thursday, a World Anti-Doping Agency independent commission headed by the Canadian lawyer Dick Pound alleged that Lamine Diack orchestrated a conspiracy to cover-up certain doping results, mostly in Russia.

The conspiracy revolved, in the words of the report, around a “close inner circle.” That is, just a few people: Diack; two of his sons, Papa Massata Diack and Khalil, also known as Ibrahima; and Diack’s personal lawyer, Habib Cissé.

With the “consultants and lawyer in place,” according to the report, Lamine Diack created an “informal illegitimate governance structure outside the formal governance structure.”

Their “familiar or close personal ties to [the IAAF president] facilitated the emergence of this powerful rogue group outside the IAAF governance structure, yet operated under the aegis of the IAAF.”

At some level, according to the report, the conspiracy also metastasized to include the Russian treasurer of the IAAF, Valentin Balakhnichev; a Russian national-team coach, Alexi Melnikov; and the director of the IAAF’s medical and anti-doping department, Dr. Gabriel Dollé.

Last week, per the IAAF ethics commission, Papa Diack, Balakhnichev and Melnikov got life bans from the sport, Dollé a five-year suspension.

Lamine Diack and Cissé are now facing criminal inquiry in France.

Balakhhnichev gets to deal with the fallout in Russia. Good luck with that, and enjoy any and all meetings with Mr. Putin, depicted in the report as someone with whom Lamine Diack said he had “struck up a friendship.”

The report is notable for who it names and, critically, who it does not.

Again, Diack and sons; Cissé; Dollé; Balakhnichev; Melnikov.

For good measure, there is also reference to “sports marketing consultant” Ian Tan Tong Han, a business associate (ahem) and close friend of Papa Diack’s — Tan’s baby, born two years ago, is named “Massata” — who “appears to be part of the illicit informal governance system of the IAAF.”

That’s it.

The report notes, meanwhile, that other senior IAAF staff members were quite properly “antagonistic” in regards to the case management of Russian athletes and, from the point of view of the conspiracy, “needed to be bribed to stay quiet.”

These included the director of the office of the president, Cheikh Thiaré; Nick Davies, the deputy secretary general; Dollé; and Dr. Pierre Yves Garnier, at the time in charge of what in anti-doping circles is known as the “athlete biological passport,” a work-up of blood values over time.

From the report: Lamine Diack apparently confirmed in interviews with French authorities that Papa Diack “gave money to one or the other to keep them quiet and so they are not opposed.”

Recent media reports have Thiaré, Davies and Garnier refuting those claims, the report says, adding that Dollé “regrets having been involved.”

Draw your own conclusions about who the “one or the other” might be.

Davies, meanwhile, the longtime IAAF spokesman, is now apparently in line to be made the fall guy for a July, 2013, email to Papa Diack, the report calling the email “inexplicable.” This is a difficult situation for all of us who have known, and worked with, Davies. He cares passionately about track and field, and has sought only to do what — from his perspective — has been the right thing.

At any rate, in the report’s version of the money shot, it declares that “corruption was embedded in the organization,” meaning the IAAF, adding, “It cannot be ignored or dismissed as attributable to the odd renegade acting on his own. The IAAF allowed the conduct to occur and must accept its responsibility. Continued denial will simply make it more difficult to make genuine progress.”

This begs the obvious question:

What per se is — or, more properly, was — the IAAF?

This inquiry is neither didactic nor pedantic.

The report, unanimously approved by all three independent commission members — former WADA boss Pound, Canadian law professor and anti-doping expert Richard McLaren and Günter Younger, the senior German law enforcement official and cyber-crime authority — also says, “The fact of the matter is that individuals at the very top of the IAAF were implicated in conduct that reflects on the organization itself (as well as on the particular individuals involved).”

In practical terms, for the 16 years he was president, Diack was the IAAF. He ran it like a fiefdom. This he learned from his predecessor, Italy’s Primo Nebiolo, president for 18 years before that.

The report asserts that the IAAF’s 27-member council “could not have been unaware of the extent of doping in [track and field] and the non-enforcement of applicable anti-doping rules.” It also says the council “could not have been unaware of the level of nepotism that operated within the IAAF.”

Fascinating.

In virtually every other instance, the report goes into incredible, sometimes granular detail, even providing an appendix at the end, to document  “the non-enforcement of applicable anti-doping rules.” Names, places, dates and more.

But in making such a blanket declaration — nothing.

If the council “could not have been unaware” of doping, when were any or all of them made so aware? Where? Who, in particular? By what means?

For this, nothing — no answer. Just this sweeping assertion.

Was the council aware Papa Diack was around? Surely.

But did those on the council, including Coe, an IAAF vice president from 2007, know or appreciate there was corruption afoot?

The report: “It is increasingly clear that far more IAAF staff knew about the problems than has currently been acknowledged. It is not credible that elected officials were unaware of the situation affecting (for purposes of the IC mandate) athletics in Russia. If, therefore, the circle of knowledge was so extensive, why was nothing done?”

Here the report is disingenuous, or at best there is a powerful disconnect.

It is for sure credible that elected officials were unaware.

Why?

Because of the first rule of Fight Club.

Which also happens to be the first rule of any conspiracy.

This is self-evident: the more people who know about something illicit, the more risk that someone who shouldn’t know is going to find out, and do something to disrupt the conspiracy.

Look, let’s have some common sense.

Did Lamine Diack call over Coe — or for that matter, the senior vice president from 2011-15, American Bob Hersh, or any of the others on the council, including Sergei Bubka, an IAAF mainstay, runner-up to Coe in last year's presidential election — and whisper, hey, guess what I’m doing that I really shouldn’t?

There is zero evidence in the report of any such thing.

So, moving forward, as Pound said at a news conference Thursday in Munich in releasing the report, it is one thing to recommend that the IAAF should, for public relations and other purposes, come clean:

“Of course, there was a cover-up and delay, and all sorts of things. Acknowledge this. If you can’t acknowledge it, you can’t get past it.”

He also said, quite rightly, “This started with the president. The president was elected four times by the congress. It then went to the treasurer, elected by the congress. It then goes to the personal advisor of the president, inserted into the management structure. It goes to the director of the medical and anti-doping [department]. It goes to nepotistic appointments. I’m sorry. That affects the reputation of the IAAF. You can deny that all you wish but I think you’ve got to take that on board and come out the other side.”

At the same time, it is quite another to say that Coe should, by association, be guilty as well. It’s not enough — not nearly — that he was part of the structure of the organization, and critically at a time when most of his focus was devoted to organizing the London 2012 Games.

That’s not the way things work. Nor should they.

Which Pound also made plain.

In response to a news conference question about whether Coe had lied in regard to a cover-up, Pound said, “I think you’ve got to understand the concentration of power in and around the president of any international federation.” Too, to understand “the relative infrequency with which something like the IAAF council would meet and the level of information that would be conveyed from those at the top to the council, particularly if it happened to deal with problems.

“If you’re asking to me to give an opinion or not as to whether he lied or not, I would say he did not lie.”

[Watch Pound's comments here.]

Pound also said he he believes Coe had “not the faintest idea of the extent” of Diack’s alleged corruption when he took over last August.

Pound said, too, “I think it’s a fabulous opportunity for the IAAF to seize this opportunity and under strong leadership to move forward. There’s an enormous amount of repetitional recovery that has to occur here and I can’t … think of anyone better than Lord Coe to lead that.”

Amen.

In the world of possibilities, it must be considered that there is evidence tying Coe to something.

But we don’t live in a world of fiction, or what-if’s. We go by what we can document, and prove. Anything else is just so much more outrage. It’s time now for dialogue and enduring change.

As WADA president Craig Reedie, in a release issued after the news conference, said, “It is now important that the IAAF, under the leadership of Sebastian Coe, adopts the recommendations of the report in full.”

Coe told the BBC Thursday in Munich that the IAAF would “redouble our efforts, to be clear to people we are not in denial.”

He added, “My responsibility is to absorb the lessons of the past and to shape the future. The changes I am making will do that. The road back to trust is going to be a long one.”

Nine days ago, IAAF staff put out a news release in which Coe set forth a 10-point “road map” aimed at rebuilding trust, in both the federation and in track and field competition itself, the idea being that you have to be able to have confidence in the federation itself and, more important, believe what you see on the track or in the field events.

The release drew comparatively little attention. Now is the time for it to take center stage, and the dialogue over how to rebuild that trust and confidence begin in earnest.

“Be under no illusion about how seriously I take these issues,” Coe said in the release. “I am president of an international federation which is under serious investigation and I represent a sport under intense scrutiny. My vision is to have a sport that attracts more young people. The average age of those watching track and field is 55 years old. That is not sustainable.

“The key to making that vision a reality is creating a sport that people once more trust in. Athletics,” meaning track and field, “ must be a sport that athletes, fans, sponsors, media and parents alike know is safe to compete in on a level playing field and one in which clean effort is rewarded and celebrated.”

USATF bids for kumbaya, for real

INDIANAPOLIS — For years, USA Track & Field was arguably the most dysfunctional of the major sports federations in the American Olympic scene. Personality politics ruled. Budgets stayed flat. Almost every decision seemed to be met with argument or that more basic question: what’s in it for me?

As any business or management expert would affirm, culture change is maybe the hardest thing ever.

Underway now at USATF, for anyone not stuck in the past and willing to look with more than a glancing pass, is a profound culture shift for the better.

Instead of being combative — first, last and always — USATF increasingly finds itself on the road to collaboration and cooperation.

A session Saturday at an Indianapolis hotel room underscored that reality amid a master’s class in leadership from Steve Miller, the USATF board chair, and Max Siegel, the organization’s chief executive.

Siegel came dressed for the meeting in an untucked business shirt; Miller, in a black polo and black loafers with no socks. Ties and jackets? No way. Disarming? To the, well, max.

Siegel called the session Saturday a “conversation” among “key stakeholders.”

Miller said, “Together we have a chance to change the sport. Separately, we have no chance.”

At another point, Miller said, “We are in this together. We have a chance to move the organization forward. We have a chance to do some things that have never been done before. We have a chance to end the repetitiveness of the five-year, the 10-year, the 20-year conversations,” the loop that inevitably led to accusations, drama, friction and more, almost none of it constructive.

Under the direction of Siegel, chief executive since May 2012, USATF has made significant financial strides. Its 2016 budget is a projected $35 million, about double what it has been in recent years — and that is without the benefit of the roughly $500 million 23-year Nike deal, which kicks in the year after.

USATF’s logical next step: streamlining its governance.

In the wake of a meeting three weeks ago at which USATF and its Athlete Advisory Committee agreed in principle on a revenue distribution plan that will deliver $9 million in cash to athletes over the next five years, the session at Indianapolis’ Alexander Hotel was called to bring together nearly 50 people — from all over the country — to discuss “law and legislation” changes.

That is, governance.

As Duffy Mahoney, USATF’s chief of high performance, said Saturday, there’s a big difference between governance and politics.

Politics is important, of course, and grabs headlines.

Governance gets stuff done.

No one cares about governance until, actually, they do care.

The close cousin of governance is process. Process is not sexy. No one cares about process.

Again, until they do care.

Example A: the process by which the USATF board last year chose Stephanie Hightower, now the USATF president, to be the federation’s nominee to the IAAF council, the sport’s international governing body, in place of Bob Hersh, who had served for 16 years.

Hightower would go on in August to be the highest vote-getter at IAAF elections in Beijing.

The process, which played out at last year’s USATF annual meeting in Anaheim, California, called first for a general assembly vote.

Most importantly, though arguably not well-communicated, that vote was merely a recommendation to the USATF board of directors — who could overrule it, by two-thirds vote.

Hersh won the floor vote.

The board, though, selected Hightower, believing in her and in a new direction amid major changes coming up at the IAAF, including the election of a new president to replace Lamine Diack of Senegal, who served atop the international federation for 16 years.

In August, the IAAF picked Britain’s Seb Coe as its new president. He defeated Ukraine’s Sergei Bubka.

On Saturday,  two activists spoke at length in favor of proposed rules changes -- Becca Peter, who lives near Seattle, and David Greifinger, a Santa Monica, California-based lawyer.

Greifinger returned time and again to the same theme: democracy.

"That has worked in this country for a long time," he said at one moment.

For sure.

But the United States is not a pure democracy. It is a representative democracy.

As Miller observed, "The popular vote in our country does not always elect the president."

Moreover, democracy is not the same as leadership. And what nations, companies and non-profit sports organizations such as USATF need way more of is less pure democracy -- the USOC slimmed its board down from 115 to 15, and USATF is also down to 15 from 32 and, before that, over 100 -- and more leadership.

"It's one of those things about leadership," Miller said. "You don’t get elected and [suddenly] know everything about leadership."

Nothing at Saturday’s meeting will in any way prove binding. Indeed, the entire thrust was to set the stage for this year’s annual get-together, in about five weeks in Houston.

Two proposals -- both sparked by the process that saw Hightower picked for the IAAF -- may well show up in Houston:

The first, advanced by Peter: to bar the IAAF council member from simultaneously serving as USATF president or CEO. In Saturday’s straw poll, that got two votes.

“You have to get the best person for the job,” the agent Tony Campbell said. “If the best person is wearing two hats, so be it.”

The second: to provide that the USATF general assembly elect the IAAF rep. Straw vote: one in favor.

“Why change this now?” asked Robin Brown-Beamon, the Florida-based association president. "It worked.”

To laughter in the room, Sharrieffa Barksdale, the 1984 Olympic hurdler, said, referring to Greifinger, "If you have ever seen the movie ‘Frozen,’ David — let it go!”

An even-better cultural touchstone, referred to indirectly several times by Miller: "We're all in this together," the pitch-perfect tune from the 2006 hit movie "High School Musical."

This was the theme three weeks ago, at the meeting with the athletes that led to agreement.

And that set the tone for Saturday’s get-together.

Reminding one and all that the metric that matters most is how many medals the U.S. team collects next summer at the Rio 2016 Games, Moushami Robinson, a gold medalist in the women's 4x400 relay at the Athens 2004 Olympics, said, “It’s time to move past the residue so we can get done what we need to get done.”

Added Dwight Phillips, the 2004 Olympic and four-time world long jump champion who is now chair of the Athletes’ Advisory Committee, “It has always been competitive: ‘Let’s fight, let’s fight, let’s fight.’ How about, ‘Let’s compromise, let’s come to an agreement.’ And we’ll see progress.”

To be sure, disagreement and discussion are always part of any institutional process. And that’s totally healthy.

At the same time, USATF’s long-running dysfunction, the temptation to immediately and vociferously wonder if the sky is falling, and now, often bore echoes of the same woes that for years beset the U.S. Olympic Committee — until the USOC, too, made needed governance changes (slimming down that board of directors) and putting people in place who know what they’re doing (in particular, chief executive Scott Blackmun, in early 2010).

Now it’s USATF’s turn to look forward — to acknowledge that while discussion and dissent have a place, so, too, do compromise and turning the page.

Another proposal advanced by Greifinger:

— The USATF board now numbers 15. Six are representatives of what’s called “constituent-based” groups, including youth, officials and coaches. The current reps are selected by a process that includes nominations and slates and further complications. What if those six reps were elected by their constituents?

The consensus Saturday: fine.

Even so, it was also generally agreed, whoever gets put up for any of those six slots must pass some sort of vetting. Details obviously remain to be worked out but it's common-sense they would include a background check, drug testing and, to be obvious, a passport for the international travel that track and field demands.

And this notion, put forward by Rubin Carter and Lionel Leach:

— Make the CEO “confer and agree” with volunteer leadership on a variety of decisions.

Confer? Sure, as appropriate, Siegel said.

Secure agreement? Not workable, Siegel said, to widespread assent.

How could he sign off on this deal or that if he had to secure the OK of volunteers who might -- or very well might not -- hold particular expertise?

Siegel also noted the unintended consequence of such a provision: “no accountability for my performance.” If everything had to be run by volunteers of different stripes, how in the real world to gain an accurate measure of what Siegel did, or didn't, get done?

This, of course, is exactly the move the USOC made -- away from volunteer leadership and toward empowerment of a professional CEO and staff.

Houston and the annual meeting await.

For the first time in a long time, maybe ever, the focus at USATF is not on what happened before -- the recrimination attendant to reliving and rehashing the past.

As Miller said, “We are in this together. We have a chance to move the organization forward.

“We have a chance to do some things that have never been done before," on the track and and off: "We have a chance to end the repetitiveness of the five-year, the 10-year, the 20-year conversation.”

IOC: $300,000 "emergency fund" for Ukraine

The International Olympic Committee on Wednesday announced it had established an “emergency fund” of $300,000 to benefit Ukrainian athletes, one of the most intriguing moves in recent memory. It underscores the will and decisiveness of the IOC president, Thomas Bach of Germany, and his bid — which he has made a point of repeated emphasis in these first months of his term — to stake out separately delineated spheres for what is sport and what is politics. Recall that the very first call Bach received upon his election last September was from Russian president Vladimir Putin.

It also comes as the days move steadily toward the IOC’s early July executive board meeting. There the list of 2022 bid cities will be finalized. Will Lviv, Ukraine, be among them?

Skeptics would say that of course 300,000 reasons to keep going would be helpful — particularly when it seems apparent Almaty, Kazakhstan, and Beijing will go through, leaving the European possibilities of Lviv, Oslo and Krakow, Poland, and both Krakow and Oslo facing distinct financial or political challenges. Indeed, Krakow is up against a May 25 referendum.

In a bizarre turn early Wednesday, someone — no one knows who — sent out a “news release” declaring that Sergej Gontcharov, the head of the Lviv 2022 bid, had been fired. There was no letterhead; the sentences were awkwardly constructed and, moreover, filled with spelling and other errors; the release was quickly dismissed as a fake. A motive also remains unclear.

As difficult as it might be for the skeptics, Sergey Bubka, the IOC executive board member who is also president of the national Olympic committee of Ukraine, said the explanation for the $300,000 fund — one wholly unconnected to the bid — is simple enough.

Bach, he said, has a genuine humanity.

Recall, too, that Bubka, the 1980s and 1990s pole vault champion, was one of the other five candidates for the IOC presidency. Now read these words:

“I think, generally, the president he was himself an Olympic champion,” in fencing at the Montreal Games in 1976. “He was a great athlete.

“Through all this period,” meaning the turbulence affecting Ukraine, “in Sochi, after Sochi, we are in contact all the time. When we are in Turkey,” in April for the SportAccord convention and the IOC executive board meeting, “we had a meeting — you can see him as a human and as a president who cares. He has feelings with a heart.

“The bidding process, all these things, of course it’s important for him to have good bids, different representation from different parts of the world. But I can see he is human.”

Bubka also said, “He is a person with a heart. It is really touching.”

And: “This help is not connected in any way to the bid. I am confident. No way.”

The IOC statement announcing the fund -- from Bach himself -- started by saying he was following the “political, economic and social developments in Ukraine with the greatest attention and growing concern. Also the situation of the Ukrainian athletes, including those who have so successfully represented their country in the recent Olympic Winter Games in Sochi, which has dramatically deteriorated.”

Ukraine won two medals in Sochi, both in biathlon, gold in the women’s 4x6-kilometer relay and bronze for Vita Semerenko in the women’s 7.5km sprint. The gold was the nation’s first in two decades.

The day after they won, the four women were invited to USA House for a private reception, the Americans operating on the belief the Ukrainians perhaps had nowhere else to celebrate; the Ukrainians got a standing ovation. The Americans played that one right down the middle, of course; earlier in the Games, Putin visited USA House as well, where he mingled and took photos.

“For all these reasons,” Bach went on in the IOC statement, “I repeat my appeal of Sochi to all political leaders involved to enter into a summit dialogue in the Olympic spirit of mutual respect and peace.”

At the United Nations on April 28, Bach reiterated the main points he laid out in a speech there in November and, as he said in in Wednesday’s statement, underscored at both the opening and closing ceremonies at the Sochi Games.

This, in part, is what he said April 28 in New York:

“One of the basic principles of sport is non-discrimination for whatever reason, including political ones. Sport is the only area of human existence with a truly universal law. This universal law is based on global ethics, fair play, respect and friendship. This means for sport and sport organizations that we have to be politically neutral without being apolitical. This means for our partners that they have to respect this responsible autonomy of the sport organizations and the universal law of sport. Otherwise, international sport with its unifying, peace-building, dialogue-enforcing and respectful efforts cannot exist.”

Back to Wednesday’s statement:

“To help the Ukrainian athletes — wherever they come from in Ukraine and whatever their background — and to help mitigate their difficult situation, the IOC has established an emergency fund of $300,000.”

The money, it said, is to go through the Ukrainian Olympic committee for both training and competition.

What it means, Bubka said, is that now, as the summer season gets underway, athletes should once again be able to go to various training camps and meets. The NOC had naturally enough been funding those activities. Now the ministry’s funds for the NOC — not enough.

Ten days ago, in Taicang, China, the Ukrainian men’s race-walking team delivered a surprise 20km team victory at the IAAF World Race Walking Cup, highlighted by 28-year-old Ruslan Dmytrenko’s first-place finish, Ukraine’s first-ever individual medal at the Cup, in a national-record 1:18.37.

Igor Glavan finished seventh, in a personal-best 1:19.59; Navar Kovalenko, 10th, in 1:20.11.

Bubka, who is also an IAAF vice president, was there for the moment, and said, “What happened in China was really amazing.”

“I joined them and I saw the happiness of our athletes, our coaches, our team. This was really for our people — the history of our team, the individual success, this is really nice, to feel the team spirit and to feel society together in this particular place.”

He also said, “These last couple of months, we have emphasized that we represent all the nation. From east to west. From north to south. We are different athletes. We are different coaches. We are one team, we are united — to represent the dream.”

And: “I believe we will overcome. The most important thing is peace.”

There will be skeptics. This is an inevitable part of life. Bubka also said, referring to the IOC president, “He cares about the Olympic family of Ukraine. He cares about the movement. This is the real solidarity. We see it and we appreciate it very much. This is important help in the difficult moment of our history from President Bach.”

Sheikh Ahmad on the record

BUENOS AIRES -- Kuwait's Sheikh Ahmad al-Fahad al-Sabah laughed the laugh of a man who had accomplished everything here he had set out to do. "The media asked what I thought," he said. "And I said, 'Thank you for making me a hero.' "

This was last Tuesday afternoon here in the lobby of the Hilton hotel. Germany's Thomas Bach had just been elected the ninth International Olympic Committee president. Earlier in the session, wrestling had been put back on the program. Tokyo had won for 2020.

Some moments before, Anita DeFrantz of Los Angeles had won election to the IOC's policy-making election board. This had delighted some. Some found it almost improbable. After all, without the sheikh in her corner, DeFrantz had managed just single-digits in prior campaigns over the past 12 years.

The U.S. Olympic Committee is still a long way from making a decision on a bid from 2024. The costs are staggering. Federal government is extremely unlikely. That said, if DeFrantz can win for the executive board with the sheikh's backing, a 2024 U.S. bid -- which he is known right now to support -- has to at least be considered.

The sheikh riffed some more: "The Americans asked me, 'Are you the most powerful man in sport?' I ask, 'Are you the most powerful country?' "

Then the sheikh got serious: "To ask if I am the most powerful man does a disservice to the power of Dr. Bach." He ticked off Bach's accomplishments: gold medal-winning fencer, IOC member for 22 years, veteran on the executive board, chair of the legal commission, chief of anti-doping investigations, negotiator of European television rights.

"Do not," he said, "do not make it look like Dr. Bach is not the power. He is the power."

Bach, 59, was elected last Tuesday the ninth IOC president.

Over the course of last week in Buenos Aires, meanwhile, the sheikh, head of the Olympic Council of Asia and of the 205-member Assn. of the National Olympic Committees, firmly established himself as the leading man of Olympic influence.

Tokyo, wrestling, Bach -- the sheikh completed a trifecta. Then, for good measure, DeFrantz.

The corollary questions:

How is this happening, and why? And is this concentration of influence in one man good for the Olympic movement?

Some are delighted. Here is a man who says he will get things done. They get done.

At the same time, others -- within and without the movement -- are wary.

And there are those, truth be told, who would would use stronger words still.

The al-Sabah family holds key positions in the Kuwaiti government and military; it has wide-ranging interests in the petroleum industry. The sheikh has made no secret of any of this. His Olympic biography, for instance, recounts his own military service as a Kuwaiti army officer (1985-90). It details, too, how he was OPEC chairman from 2003-05 as well as his country's energy minister and, since 2006, its minister of national security.

A 2008 American embassy cable, disclosed by Wikileaks, proclaims that Sheikh Ahmad is "widely perceived as being corrupt." It offers no evidence for this assertion. It also offers this no-holds-barred compliment about him: "[Sheikh Ahmad] is clever and ambitious and is widely seen as being the only member of the ruling family having both the will and the capacity to rule."

At his very first news conference as president, just hours after being elected, Bach fielded questions from around the room about his relationship with the sheikh, whose support had been well-known.

"You can't win the elections for the IOC president with the support of one person alone," Bach said, adding a moment later and referring to the IOC members, "They are very strong individual personalities. You have to convince them individually. This is what I tried to do in my campaign."

Responding to another question, Bach said, "In all my conversations with the members, there was not a promise being made. This allows me next Tuesday, when I go to Lausanne," meaning IOC headquarters in Lausanne, Switzerland, along Lake Geneva, "to start with a white sheet of paper."

Already, meanwhile, speculation is rampant that the sheikh might be interested in himself running one day for president of the IOC. Bach's term is for eight years, renewable for four more. The sheikh is just 50. There's plenty of time.

What so many want to know about the sheikh is whether is he a force for good, or otherwise.

All journalists learn early on that if one is suspicious one should think like the police or prosecutors do. If it's misconduct or wrongdoing you're looking for, look for evidence of sex, money, drugs, a lust for power or some combination thereof.

The sheikh's hangout in Lausanne is the upscale Beau Rivage hotel, along the lake. His money is for sure good there. But the same can be said of any number of IOC members.

The sheikh threw a party in Buenos Aires at the conclusion of the landmark 125th session. It was a private affair, invitation only at a super-fancy hotel. It probably was a pretty nice deal. A couple days earlier, at the same hotel, the wrestling people threw a really nice celebration party. It for sure was a really nice deal.

The sheik -- and his many, many supporters -- insist there's nothing to be suspicious about.

They say he is completely legit.

In fact, they assert, he is unequivocally committed in the Olympic sphere to best-practices good governance and transparency.

The sheikh took over ANOC last year. That role gives him oversight of the IOC's Solidarity Commission, a program that aims to provide financial, technical and administrative assistance to national Olympic committees, particularly those in developing nations.

Its 2009-13 budget: $435 million, up nearly 40 percent from the 2009-12 cycle's $311 million.

As one senior European IOC member, speaking on condition of anonymity said, "The sheikh is dedicated. The sheikh is active. The sheik is interested. It's a new order."

There endures an air of mystery about Sheikh Ahmad because of the part of the world he is from; because he is a member of his nation's royal family; because he moves in a circle to which access can be tightly controlled; and because he rarely gives on-the-record interviews.

The sheikh moves easily in Arab, western and Asian cultures. He is completely at ease in languages, including English.

It would be a fundamental mistake to underestimate Sheikh Ahmad. He is tireless. He is also keenly intelligent.

The skeptic would say it helps the sheikh considerably, as that formal Olympic bio notes, to have been minister of his country's national security's office for the past seven years. A more benign view would be that one doesn't get to that office in the first instance without first being shrewd and sophisticated about human beings, and what makes them tick.

The sheikh has been an IOC member since 1992; his father had been killed the year before, on the second day of the Iraqi invasion. The son learned a great deal from Juan Antonio Samaranch, the IOC president from 1980 until 2001, particularly about the value of relationships. The outgoing president, Jacques Rogge, referred to him last Monday in a light moment as "someone who is like my younger brother."

This is a significant key to the sheikh's success in moving within the IOC.

It has been said many, many times about the IOC but bears repeating. Within the so-called Olympic family, relationships are everything.

So, too, the sheikh said, in trying to advance any campaign: "Logic."

And, he said: "Credibility."

And: "In the end, winning."

As simple as this seems, it's also elemental, and why so many want to jump aboard with him: "People like to win."

Before the presidential voting, the only issue was not whether Bach would win. It was whether he would steamroll to a first-round victory.

Almost.

In a field of six, Bach needed 47 for victory. He got 43 -- itself a remarkable thing.

In the next round, again needing 47, Bach picked up six more votes, winning easily.

His nearest challenger, Richard Carrión of Puerto Rico, managed 29. Ser Miang Ng of Singapore took six, Denis Oswald of Switzerland five, Sergei Bubka of Ukraine four. C.K. Wu of Chinese Taipei had been eliminated in the first round.

Asked if non-believers ought to believe in him now, the sheikh said, "I think people ought to believe in those numbers."

He made a joke: "I am not competing for a spot in the international journalists' federation."

Then, again, seriously, "There [are] rumors, media, PR," adding a moment later, "In the end you have to accept. I think people are accepting me."

Bach wins the presidency

BUENOS AIRES -- Thomas Bach of Germany was elected president of the International Olympic Committee Tuesday, replacing Jacques Rogge of Belgium. Bach is a gold medal-winning fencer at the 1976 Montreal Games who went on to become a lawyer. He was made an IOC member in 1991 and has served in virtually every position but president. Over the years, he has made no secret of his ambition for the top job.

Now he has it, winning decisively in the second round of voting over five other candidates. He received 49 votes, two more than he needed. Combined, the other five got 44.

Bach, 59, becomes the IOC's ninth president. Eight of the nine have been Europeans. The only exception: the American Avery Brundage, who served from 1952 to 1972.

The new president will serve a term of at least eight years. IOC rules permit the possibility of a four-year second term. Bach said he hoped to lead according to his campaign motto, "Unity in diversity," and declared, "You should know that my door, my ears and my heart are always open for you.''

The intrigue in Tuesday's balloting underscored Bach's support -- completely overt -- from the Olympic world's new No. 1 power-broker, Kuwait's Sheikh Ahmad al-Fahad al-Sabah.

Also manifestly at work Tuesday, indeed throughout this landmark 125th IOC session, at which Tokyo was selected host for the 2020 Games and wrestling was put back onto the program for the 2020 and 2024 Summer Olympics:  the influence of Russian president Vladimir Putin. As Bach was making his way down a line of reporters shortly after being elected, Dmitry Chernyshenko's phone rang. He heads the Sochi 2014 organizing committee. It was Putin calling, for Bach, with congratulations.

As one triangulates, let there be no doubt: Sheikh Ahmad is now unequivocally positioned as one of the most influential figures in international sport.

This, too: Bach is certainly European. But to have a key political backer who is head of the Olympic Council of Asia and head of the Assn. of National Olympic Committees is perhaps evidence of a subtle shift in the Olympic worldview.

At any rate, about this there can be no misunderstanding: the IOC election Tuesday completed a turn that through 2013 has seen an older generation of leadership moved aside by younger personalities with different ideas and new energy.

This political master drama, a classical study that academics and operatives alike could learn much from as it played out in real life over more than 10 years, intensifying over the last 18 months, culminated Tuesday in Bach's emphatic ascent.

Out: Rogge, Mexico's Mario Vazquez Raña and, in something of a rebuke to the outgoing president, his former associate, the former International Cycling Union president Hein Verbruggen of Holland. Verbruggen served Rogge in a variety of roles, including as chief of the Beijing 2008 Games coordination commission; he was also the former head of SportAccord, the umbrella group of international sport federations.

Vazquez Raña and Verbruggen have hardly disappeared from the scene, and to count them out completely -- each entirely accomplished and hugely intelligent -- might well, it is true, be premature. Now, though, the leverage and access are completely different.

In: Bach, the sheikh, the judo federation and new SportAccord president Marius Vizer, who lives in Hungary, and perhaps a handful of trusted others. This, as Bach's mandate gets underway, is the essential new power base of Olympic sport.

Bach defeated five other challengers: Richard Carrión of Puerto Rico, Sergei Bubka of Ukraine, Denis Oswald of Switzerland, Ser Miang Ng of Singapore and C.K. Wu of Chinese Taipei. Only Carrión, the IOC's finance chairman, managed even double-digits in the two rounds of voting.

In Bach, amid a world buffeted by economic, environmental and security challenges, the IOC signaled that it was not looking for transformational change.

While the other five candidates in their campaign manifestoes, or action plans, had proposed suggestions that put the IOC at the center of a variety of wide-ranging global sport and technology initiatives, Bach for the most part focused on the IOC's franchise, the Olympic Games.

"Considering the many challenges ahead, the IOC's focus must be safeguarding the uniqueness and relevance of the Olympic Games in an ever-changing world," Bach had said in his.

He also said that "keeping the Olympic Games the most attractive event in the world for all stakeholders is a top priority for the IOC."

This may not be especially bold. This might not be particularly opportunistic. Then again, the IOC tends to be traditional, especially at big moments. And, given the stakes, it makes fundamental sense when looked at in bright light.

Sochi 2014 and Rio 2016, for instance, are now being referred to in influential Olympic circles as "experiment" Olympics. The capital budget for Sochi is already north of $50 billion and the new anti-gay law there has raised concerns in several Western nations. In Rio, construction is running slow and over-budget and, moreover, it was disclosed here that sponsorships are proving hard to sell.

Thus: when the IOC members looked around at this moment in time, what -- most -- did they want?

Continuity.

The Rogge years will likely be viewed, most of all, by one word: stability.

Juan Antonio Samaranch of Spain served before Rogge for 21 years. Samaranch is still largely a beloved figure within the IOC. Elsewhere, the first thing that often comes up is the Salt Lake City corruption scandal, which erupted in the late 1990s.

Rogge was elected in large measure to see the IOC through the Salt Lake reforms and to restore the institution's worldwide prestige.

"You have led us through those bad times," Princess Haya al Hussein of the United Arab Emirates, president of the International Equestrian Federation, told Rogge as the assembly closed late Monday, adding he "clearly understood" the IOC's way forward was rooted in "good governance."

She said he had brought "our family out of its darkest times into a good future," years that in time people will come to understand as truly remarkable fiscally, growing the IOC's financial reserves from $100 million to more than $900 million despite the global economic crisis -- enough to survive an entire four-year Olympic cycle, indeed to secure what the princess called a "clear future."

Rogge's response was classic: "I did no more than my duty,"  he said, adding, "What has been achieved is not one man. It is a team. Thank you very much."

Rogge, an orthopedic surgeon by training, came to office on a summer Monday in Moscow in 2001. He was then 59, an IOC member for 10 years, a man of distinct vigor, his hair still dark.

After 12 years in office, he steps down in winter on a Tuesday in Buenos Aires. He is now 71. His hair is grey.

"If you want to achieve something in the IOC, you have to age," he said wryly during the assembly late Monday to Christophe Dubi, the sports director and incoming Games executive director, whom Rogge has always called "young man."

Intensely European himself, Rogge nonetheless oversaw Games for the first time in China (2008) and the IOC's "new horizons" moves to South America (Rio 2016) and, for the Winter Games, Russia (2014) and South Korea (2018).

Rogge oversaw six editions of the Games, three Summer, three Winter and, as well, ushered in the Youth Games, the first Summer edition in Singapore in 2010, the first Winter product in Innsbruck in 2012.

"The fact that I could describe six Olympic Games and two Youth Games as being successful is for me the biggest reward I could have," he said here.

Beyond Salt Lake, Rogge also had to cope with unexpectedly intensified security concerns. The 9/11 attacks took place three months after Rogge took office, just five months before the 2002 Salt Lake Games, and would add security complications to those Olympics and thereafter.

He had to confront a multitude of financial issues. Some involved a lengthy dispute with the U.S. Olympic Committee over certain broadcasting and marketing revenues. They cut a new deal last year.

There were other issues as well: illicit doping and illegal match-fixing, in particular.

Throughout, Rogge remained typically calm, almost always implacable. His management style tended toward the technocratic. It was big on process.

This could be seen in the 12 years of back, forth and sideways over the Summer Games line-up which ended Sunday with the members' vote to reinstate wrestling.

It had been kicked out in February of what was called the "core" group of sports by the IOC's policy-making executive board, then forced to fight with squash and a combined bid from baseball/softball for a place.

Squash has been on the outside looking in for 10 years. Baseball and softball were both once in and now are out. Meanwhile, over the Rogge presidency, the only additions to the Summer Games sports line-up are that, come 2016, golf and rugby-sevens will be played.

Surfing? Skateboarding? Still waiting.

Virtually everyone associated with the Olympic movement agrees the program needs wholesale review.

So, too, the bid city process. The 2020 line-up produced just three finalists -- Tokyo, Madrid, Istanbul -- after four for 2016 and five of the world's great cities for 2012.

Mostly, what the movement needs is simply a dose of new energy.

There are those who say that in Bach, the sheikh and Vizer the movement is heading in ways no one can portend.

Then again, these three also say that they -- along with the head of the Summer Games' federations' association, which goes by the acronym ASOIF, currently Francesco Ricci Bitti of Italy, the international tennis federation president -- can foresee a new way. They say it might open up new avenues of governance and, to be candid, transparency.

Big picture, the IOC is caught in transition between 19th-century club and 21st-century multibillion-dollar business.

The way the IOC is structured, authority has been far too confined between the president, the director-general and remarkably few staff. The model would hardly pass many business-school studies.

Bach surely now has a mandate.

The sole question heading into Tuesday's vote was not whether Bach would win. It was whether he would win on the first round.

"People are turning," one of the soon-to-be defeated candidates had said late Monday night, acknowledging the obvious. "For months they tell you one thing. They look at you in the eye and now tonight they tell you something else. It's very disappointing."

It is an IOC maxim that in the first round members vote for their friends. In the second they get serious.

In the first-round, Bach carried 43. Carrión got 23, Bubka 8, Oswald 7, Ng and Wu 6 apiece. IOC rules put the tie to a run-off; Ng got 56, Wu 36; Ng moved on to the second round, Wu was eliminated.

In the second round, needing 47 votes to win, Bach got those 49. Carrión took 29, Ng 6, Oswald 5, Bubka 4.

The candidacies of both Ng and Wu were apparently hurt by Tokyo's win for 2020. Five times to Asia in 12 years ... Tokyo 2020 just three days ago ... the notion of an Asian president ... it was all, as the as the senior Canadian member Dick Pound put it, "too much Asia, too soon."

Twelve years ago, Rogge -- in a field of five -- won in the second round with 59 votes; runner-up Kim Un Young of South Korea got 23.

If it seems obvious, this is a lesson Samaranch taught, and the sheikh obviously took to heart: relationships are everything, and people like to know that they matter.

This is why the line-up to see Sheikh Ahmad in Room 532 of the Hilton Hotel here throughout the week was non-stop. What was he offering inside? Coffee. Tea. Water.

On Monday evening, wearing a paisley jeans and a shirt, he stopped in front of a coffee bar in the Hilton lobby. For a solid 10 minutes, a stream of well-wishers stopped to chat.

The sheikh, 50, first signaled his strength last year when he took over as president of the Assn. of National Olympic Committees, deposing the venerable Vazquez Raña. ANOC represents the world's 204 national Olympic committees. The vote: 174 in his favor, one against, two abstentions.

Last year in London, he helped elect to the IOC executive board both Patrick Hickey of Ireland and one of Tuesday's presidential candidates, Wu.

Earlier this year, he and his team helped engineer Vizer's SportAccord election.

Then, earlier this summer, they saw to it that Buenos Aires won the 2018 Youth Games.

On Saturday, Tokyo 2020.

Tuesday, Bach.

In voting later Tuesday afternoon the sheikh helped elect Anita DeFrantz of Los Angeles to the IOC's executive board. She had last served on the board in 2001.

One of the players in one of these dramas was in the Hilton lobby after the presidential election. He was willing to speak but not for the record:  "A new world is open now."

Wrestling is back

BUENOS AIRES -- The International Olympic Committee, recognizing the gravity of its error, reinstated wrestling to the 2020 Summer Games program. At the same time, the IOC rejected bids to put squash and a combined effort from baseball/softball onto the show at the Tokyo 2020 Games, underscoring the fix it has put itself in as it seeks to keep the program relevant.

"This was a mistake," the influential Kuwaiti Sheikh Ahmad al-Fahad al-Sabah said before the vote to reinstate wrestling, referring to the move last February by the IOC's policy-making executive board to take it off the 2020 program.

The IOC fixed the mistake in a one-and-done vote.

What next?

Maybe, perhaps, possibly finding a way for baseball/softball to be played in Tokyo, after all. That needs to wait, though, for the new president, and some other discussions -- none of which can even begin until after Tuesday, when part three of this landmark 125th IOC session transpires, the presidential election.

Sunday saw part two, the sports vote, following Saturday's part one, the election of Tokyo, which prevailed over Istanbul and Madrid.

Six candidates are running for president: Germany's Thomas Bach; Puerto Rico's Richard Carrión; Singapore's Ser Miang Ng; C.K. Wu of Chinese Taipei; Switzerland's Dennis Oswald; and Sergei Bubka of Ukraine.

With the sports vote out of the way, there are now two full days of mostly boring reports and mundane session business to keep the members from wondering what is the best steakhouse in Buenos Aires. The real action is elsewhere -- the presidential derby and re-hashing the 2020 vote, and triangulating the influence of Sheikh Ahmad, Bach and others such as Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Putin?

For sure.

When Putin took office as Russian president for the second time, on May 7, 2012, with whom did he hold his first meeting?

With Jacques Rogge.

The presentations and the vote Sunday marked just the latest step in a long-running Olympic drama. It is far from over because the IOC, frankly, has not figured out the essentials in mixing the traditional sports it has to have on the program -- track and field, swimming, gymnastics, wrestling -- with others needed to keep it fresh and interesting not just for television but to teens and young adults.

Such as, for instance, surfing and skateboarding.

The IOC in many ways has done a commendable job of adding so-called "action sports" to the Winter Games program.

The Summer program?

Over the 12 years of the Rogge presidency, the only changes to the program have been that both baseball and softball have been kicked out -- there's a cogent argument to be made that some of it is rooted in either Eurocentricism or latent anti-Americanism, the latter of which is vehemently denied -- and golf and rugby-sevens added for 2016.

For both Summer and Winter, the IOC has undertaken a laborious process designed to assign metrics to each sport -- TV viewing, internet ratings, governance categories and more -- and then tried to drop them into a group it calls the "core."

After every Games, all the sports are to be reviewed. To simplify, there is to be a new "core" every four years.

The first review -- the thing that landed wrestling on the outside this time around -- came after London. Modern pentathlon stayed inside the core. Wrestling, no.

As part of an intriguing debate that preceded Sunday's vote and presentations, Russia's Alex Popov -- the champion swimmer -- asked whether the IOC was going to have to go through the entire drama all over again in four years.

That is, he asked, was there going to be another "core" review?

Yes, Rogge said.

North Korea's Ung Chang, who typically does not ask pointed questions at the IOC's assemblies, raised his hand. He took the obvious route -- why last February was wrestling told it had to fight for a spot?

With Italy's Franco Carraro, chairman of the program commission, standing at the lectern, ready to answer, Rogge said that question clearly carried political overtones -- would you like me to answer? Everyone laughed, especially Carraro, and away Rogge went:

The wrestling federation, Rogge said, suffered from poor governance and confusing rules, and Greco-Roman was not so popular, among just a few reasons.

Meanwhile, Canada's senior member, Dick Pound, said what so many members have said privately, that to reinstate wrestling -- which was where the day was manifestly heading -- was simply taking the IOC "back to where we [had] started." What was the point?

Pound suggested the IOC take the five months between this assembly in Buenos Aires and the IOC's next full meeting, at the Sochi Games next February, to come up with a better solution.

Thank you, Rogge said, but no: "We should respect our own decisions."

First up, then, was the vote to approve the "core" group of 25 sports.

A simple majority was required to carry the vote.

The tally: 77 yes, 16 no.

Each of the three sports then made their presentations.

Baseball/softball went first.

The historical arc of what the two sports are trying to accomplish in growing worldwide is plain to see.

The games came of age in the United States in the early 20th century. Then they spread to the western hemisphere and to such Asian nations as Japan and Chinese Taipei.

Now they are taking root in Europe, Africa and elsewhere in Asia. Just as with golf, the plan is to use the Olympics as a catalyst to get bigger in growing markets.

The emotional pitch came from Don Porter, the longtime head of the softball federation. He fought back tears as he told the IOC members about 511 letters he kept in a box on his desk -- letters from girls all over the world asking for softball to be put back into the Olympics.

"I hope today you will … help restore their dreams," Porter told the IOC members.

Squash went next.

N. Ramachandran, the federation's chief, made it plain in the first few moments: "Squash represents the future, not the past." Yo, wrestling!

A video showed how you could put a glass court anywhere. The sport would need only two courts for its 64 Olympic players -- 32 men, 32 women. You can rent a court for $3,000 a day or buy two for about $500,000, Ramachandran said -- cheap. The federation has been campaigning for an Olympic spot for a full 10 years, the sort of persistence the IOC says it likes.

A teenager from the Bronx, Andreina Benedith, the United States' under-19 champion, speaking in Spanish, no less, said, "Squash changed my life."

All this was well and good.

But these two sports were up against the weight of tradition, history and politics.

"This is the most important day in the 3,000-year history of our sport," Nenad Lalovic of Serbia, the new president of FILA, the wrestling federation, said at the start of its presentation, outlining the various changes it, and the sport, had taken over the year.

He emphasized, "We are not here to speak about the past. We are here to speak about the future."

Now, FILA is a "modern, effective member of the Olympic family," he said. It promised the IOC 15 new commissions; now it has 17. It will have at least one female vice-president and on its board three seats for women and one for an athlete.

The February action by the IOC executive board, Jim Scherr, a FILA bureau member and the former chief executive of the U.S. Olympic Committee, was a "wake-up call," adding, "We have made extraordinary progress over the last six months, just extraordinary," including the addition of two weight classes in Rio 2016 for women, cutting out two classes for men.

"FILA," Scherr said, "understands its responsibilities."

So, too, did the IOC.

No way, especially after Tokyo won for 2020, was wresting going to be denied. Yes, baseball is big in Japan. But Japan won six wrestling medals in London last year, second-most.

Russia won 11. Those 11 medals made up 13 percent of the Russians' 82 total in London.

As Dmitry Chernyshenko, the head of the Sochi 2014 Winter Games, posted in a photo from inside the IOC assembly hall to his Twitter feed, "Wanna see the one who would say 'no' to the legendary Karelin!;-)"

Alexander Karelin, of course, is the legendary man-mountain Greco-Roman wrestler, winning three gold medals and one silver over his Olympic career.

Reality check: if Russia, the United States, Japan and others wanted it, it was going to happen.

Super-reality check: Putin, Putin, Putin. The Sochi Games are five months away, and though wrestling is not a Winter Games sport, don't think for a second that he doesn't exert considerable influence over what is happening here.

The vote, and in the first round, with 48 needed to get back in: 49 for wrestling, 24 for baseball/softball, 22 for squash.

Now comes the intriguing possibility that five months from now the new president -- whoever he is -- will carve out an exception to the rules to allow the runner-up to be allowed a place in the Tokyo program.

One might say that's unthinkable, that IOC rules don't allow for such a thing.

Then again, last February, who would have ever thought that wrestling would have had to fight in the first instance for its place in 2020?

If you were listening closely, you might have heard Rogge drop a fascinating signal as the meeting wrapped up Sunday afternoon. He said, "Hopefully, baseball is successful in the future."

Who do you love?

BUENOS AIRES -- As circuses go, this one is most excellent. The question: who will be the next ringleader and where is the next tent to be pitched? Here Friday morning in the corner of the Hilton Hotel lobby one could see Thomas Bach of Germany, the International Olympic Committee vice president running for the top job, talking very, very quietly with Cuba's Reynaldo González López.

A few feet away, in the main hotel lobby, Her Imperial Highness Takamado of Japan held court, meeting first with Italy's Ottavio Cinquanta, president of the international skating federation, then with His Royal Highness Prince Feisal al Hussein of Jordan.

On the big screen set up just a few more feet away, the international wrestling federation's press conference got underway, the changes the IOC had sought to see from the federation dramatically evident on the dais -- here were two female wrestlers along with the new FILA president, Serbia's Nenad Lalovic.

Speaking of royalty -- here was His Imperial Basketball Highness, the former Sacramento King, Vlade Divac, near the front door, now the president of the Serbian national Olympic committee. His luggage had been lost on the way down to Buenos Aires. What was a really tall guy to do in such a situation?

You want a story? Every few feet, every different huddle held a different story, the soundtrack of the entire thing encapsulated in George Thorogood's brilliant tour de force: who do you love?

The scramble for votes was on in full force as the landmark 125th IOC session got underway Friday night.

The 2020 vote goes down Saturday. Tokyo and Madrid seemed the likeliest choices. That said, no one was by any means willing to rule Istanbul out, and its supporters insisted they were very much still in it.

With apologies to Divac and mixed metaphors, wrestling seemed all but a slam-dunk certainty to be reinstated in voting Sunday to the 2020 program.

Los Angeles Lakers alert! Here was Divac, who of course played for L.A. before exile to Charlotte and Sacramento and then a last season in Los Angeles. Was that Pau Gasol? The current Laker big man is part of the Madrid team.

The intrigue underpinning the sports vote: which of the other two, baseball/softball or squash, will run second? Due to a quirk in the calendar, the next IOC session comes just five months from now, in Sochi in February. An entirely plausible scenario floating in the ether had it that an exception could well be carved out -- there being a new president and all -- for the runner-up here to be added to the program come 2020.

Everyone close to the Olympic scene -- repeat, everyone -- acknowledges that the process by which wrestling was first dropped and now appears on the verge of being reinstated needs wholesale review.

If Tokyo wins, imagine how easy it would be to imagine adding baseball/softball to the program.

Or adding squash, no matter which of the cities prevails.

The presidential vote -- which trumps all others, with six candidates -- happens Tuesday. That means Monday, an off day if you will, is likely to be rife with all manner of speculation, rumor, gossip and prevarications. Joining Bach on the ballot: C.K. Wu of Chinese Taipei; Richard Carrión of Puerto Rico; Ser Miang Ng of Singapore; Sergei Bubka of Ukraine; Denis Oswald of Switzerland.

IOC presidential elections have traditionally been subdued affairs. In the 24/7, TMZ-style world in which we now live, with camera crews scrambling for any image, the IOC is determined to keep it subdued.

This is the challenge:

The IOC received 1,846 media requests. A full 600 came from Japan; 300 from Spain; 180 from Turkey.

On Thursday, Bubka, the 1980s and '90s pole-vault champion who is now the head of his nation's Olympic committee and a vice president of the track and field international governing body, was sitting near where Bach would find himself Friday. When Bubka got up, that so stirred the camera crews that they madly began clicking and clacking.

This so unnerved the security and hotel staff that they thereupon drew the shades.

On Friday morning, the shades were still down.

This makes for an apt -- here comes that word again -- metaphor. The IOC votes in secret.

Thus here is the one absolute truth about such IOC elections:

The only thing predictable about an IOC election is that it is entirely unpredictable.

The candidate city votes happen every other year. The presidential vote is a generational thing -- every eight or 12 years, depending.

About the outcomes of either or both, this means -- as was sagely noted in the lobby -- the following:

Some people are guessing. Some pretend to know. Some assume. Some hope. No one knows.

A great many people are only too happy to lie, or maybe at least stretch the truth, or not just do what their kindergarten teacher would find wholesome.

Why do they act this way?

That's easy.

Because they can.

A skeptic would say the system encourages the members to be unaccountable.

Perhaps.

In truth, one figures out fairly consistently who votes for what -- though, to be fair, not with 100 percent accuracy. The IOC is a club, and clubs have certain discretions. What keeps the members accountable is that -- this is for real -- they are accountable to each other. Because there are votes for bid cities every two years, and votes for the policy-making executive board every year, there are favors and counter-favors and so on. One screws someone else at one's peril because, sooner or later, it comes back to haunt you.

The 2018 vote, won by Pyeongchang, was a runaway, which pretty much everyone -- except for a few affiliated with runner-up Munich -- knew going in.

The 2016 vote, won by Rio de Janeiro, was also a runaway, which Rio knew, even if others did not.

This 2020 vote does not appear to have a clear favorite. Thus the tension Friday in the Hilton lobby was very, very real, and theories fast and furious.

Right now there are, including the outgoing president Jacques Rogge, 103 IOC members. He does not vote. That means the vote count is a maximum 102. It likely will prove less because some members won't show up  -- because of illness or duties of business or state -- and because of IOC rules that prevent a member from Country X for voting from a candidate from the same nation. It is widely assumed that the winning vote total here -- majority plus one -- is going to be 48 or 49.

Because the balloting is secret, the members cheerfully tell each other whatever. In tallying up support, the denominator of 100 votes can quickly seem more like 200, indeed -- laughably -- more like 300.

"I support you," in IOC jargon, it must be understood, does not mean, "I'm going to vote for you."

"You have my vote," does not mean "in a round you want me to." Or "any particular round."

Indeed, in 2009, in balloting for the 2016 Summer Games site, the U.S. Olympic Committee felt sure before voting commenced that it had more than 30 rock-solid votes in the first round for Chicago. To the USOC's surprise, Chicago was booted in the first round with but 18 votes.

This is why, as one of the presidential contenders, surveying the scene Friday mid-afternoon, said, "Who the heck knows?" And he didn't say "heck."

This was a little bit after Kuwait's Sheikh Ahmad al-Fahad al-Sabah, the head of the Assn. of National Olympic Committees, walked in the lobby and the center of gravity seemed to shift, all eyes turning the sheik's direction. As has been speculated many times since he has become one of the Olympic world's most influential figures, with no definitive answer: how many votes does his excellency truly "control"? Any? Many?

As for the sheikh and 2020:

Does he support Tokyo? After all, he is also the longtime head of the Olympic Council of Asia. Within Olympic circles, it is hardly a secret that Tsunekazu Takeda, Japan's IOC member and the leader of the Tokyo 2020 bid, has been known to ride with the sheikh to important meetings on the sheikh's private plane.

Does he back Madrid? He and Alejandro Blanco, the head of the Spanish Olympic Committee, are known to be close through an association with Marius Vizer, president of the International Judo Federation and, as well, the recently elected head of SportAccord, the umbrella organization for the international sports federations.

Or might the sheikh prefer Istanbul? An Istanbul win probably knocks Doha, Qatar, out of the running for the Summer Games for many years. Given the intricacies of politics in the Middle East, might the sheikh find that a play worth exploring?

The sheikh is believed to be a supporter of Bach's presidential candidacy. Ultimately -- will he be?

The sheikh likes, most of all, winning.

Actually, two more things can be said for certain about an IOC election:

One, Fidel Castro's son, Antonio, is here, lobbying for the baseball/softball project. His translator speaks English so beautifully that Shakespeare himself might want to give a listen.

Two, Sheikh Ahmad controls his own vote.

The vision thing

BUENOS AIRES -- The intrigue, the mystery, the drama of the history-making 125th International Olympic Committee session got underway Wednesday, and though there are three essential decisions to be taken here -- the 2020 Summer Games site, wrestling's all-but-inevitable reinstatement and the election of the new president -- there is one that overrides everything. It's that last one, the selection of the new president. Jacques Rogge's 12 years as president are all but done. The IOC is about to turn to a new era.

Everything else that happens here must be viewed in that context, through that prism. True, the presidential election comes last on the docket, after the 2020 and wrestling votes, but it's first in import.

To not understand that is to fail to understand the obvious, and to comprehend the cascade of deal-making and possibilities at work throughout the coming week here at the Hilton hotel.

Big picture:

Jacques Rogge is a sober, sensible man. He tends to process things in an orderly way, and to define challenges through bureaucratic, indeed technocratic, systems. His worldview is entirely Eurocentric -- though, true enough, he has overseen the IOC's "new horizons" Summer Games moves for the first time into China (2008) and South America (Brazil 2016) and the Winter Games to Russia (2014) and South Korea (2018).

About his presidency, he reflected Wednesday, "Have I enjoyed it? Not always. Was it exciting? Definitely. Was it a privilege to be able to do that? Of course it was."

Rogge, as he further made crystal-clear at a news conference Wednesday marking the final meeting during his term of the IOC's policy-making executive board, defined the success of his 12 years as the rendition of various editions of the Games, Summer, Winter and Youth -- that is, the instrument by which the values of the movement are executed.

In all, starting with Salt Lake City in 2002 and ending with London last year, there were three Winter, three Summer and two Youth Games during the Rogge years. He said, "The fact that I could describe six Olympic Games and two Youth Games as being successful is for me the biggest reward I could have."

This, then, is both the challenge and the opportunity facing the other 102 members of the IOC as they gather here in Buenos Aires for the votes ahead.

The IOC is facing an extraordinary moment in time.

The salient question it -- that is, the members -- must confront is elemental:

Is the movement mostly about the Games?

Or it is about more -- indeed, in an increasingly connected world, much, much more?

The IOC, alone in the world not just among sports bodies but every other organization, has the opportunity to re-frame what it does so that it becomes not just a once-every-two-year organization but an entity -- and by extension, the international sports federations and the national Olympic committees -- that is part and parcel of the day-to-day lives, indeed the dreams, of billions of people across planet earth.

That is not hyperbole.

The members should be asking, as they wander around the Hilton lobby and, alone in their rooms at night, read -- or, re-read -- the manifestoes of the six presidential candidates: what is it you want?

That is: what do you want the organization to be? What role do you want for yourselves within it?

And more:

Where is the IOC going to be when this next president's eight years -- that is, in 2021 -- are up? If you choose a candidate who gets or wants another four years, that takes him -- and the IOC -- to 2025. As seemingly unimaginable as that might be: imagine the role you want the IOC to play across and in our world by then. Does it involve more than the Games? Or is that it?

That is what is at stake in this presidential election.

This is also in a fundamental way what is at issue in what has, in IOC jargon, come to be known as the "ABB" movement -- that is, "anyone but Bach."

Thomas Bach is the German IOC vice president typically described in media accounts as the front-runner in the presidential race. To be clear: Bach is thoroughly qualified to be the next president, having served the movement over his lifetime -- beginning with his gold medal-winning career as a fencer -- in virtually every role but the presidency.

In his manifesto, Bach says, "Considering the many challenges ahead, the IOC's focus must be safeguarding the uniqueness and relevance of the Olympic Games in an ever-changing world." He adds that "keeping the Olympic Games the most attractive event in the world for all stakeholders is a top priority for the IOC."

The other candidates -- Singapore's Ser Miang Ng, Puerto Rico's Richard Carrión, C.K. Wu of Chinese Taipei, Sergei Bubka of Ukraine and Denis Oswald of Switzerland -- have sought to define their visions in broader terms.

Oswald, for instance: the IOC must be the "moral authority of world sport."

Wu has proposed a variety of education-based initiatives to actively engage the world's young people.

Bubka's 28-page manifesto is punctuated with novel ideas, including an "Olympic Future Project," a "Council of Elders," an IOC "Youth Council" and "Icons Council," the creation of so-called "Olympic Global Citizens" and the enhancement of the Cultural Olympiad.

Ng asserts the movement's "fundamental calling" is to "instill the eternal values of Olympism in the youth of the world," and calls for a variety of values-oriented partnerships and initiatives -- with the members themselves, corporate partners and "like minded organizations and governments."

In a like manner, Carrión's manifesto says the IOC finds itself on the cusp of a "Great Olympic Era" well beyond just the Games. He, too, calls for values-centered partnerships and projects with the members as well as with athletes, the United Nations and others.

To be sure, there is nothing wrong with first-rate Games. That is the foundation. That is what Rogge has done, and brought -- stability.

When Rogge was elected in 2001, elected in Moscow, succeeding Juan Antonio Samaranch, who had been president for 21 years, the IOC was still reeling from the effects of the Salt Lake City corruption scandal. The prestige and standing of the IOC worldwide was very much at issue.

Too, the IOC was facing a world in which security concerns -- paramount since the 1972 Munich Games, when 11 Israeli athletes and coaches were kidnapped and murdered by Palestinian terrorists -- would be newly intensified in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.

Doping issues made for a major challenge. How, for instance, would the World Anti-Doping Agency be integrated into the international sports scene? Marion Jones, Lance Armstrong and others would test resolve, patience and systems.

Moreover, the IOC had to confront a multitude of financial issues. Some involved a longstanding dispute with the U.S. Olympic Committee over certain broadcasting and marketing revenue. Others revolved around the IOC's own financial stability, in particular its reserves, which needed to be grown significantly.

In large measure, the IOC addressed each of these concerns and, through Rogge's term, delivered successful -- and in the case of Beijing 2008, historic -- Games.

There were, too, as Rogge has said, reasons for sorrow, as in the death of Georgian luger Nodar Kumaritashvili before the Vancouver 2010 Olympics. Rogge said Wednesday that was the "worst" moment of his tenure.

Rogge also said he believes the challenges his successor will face "will not differ very much" from those he inherited.

In this respect, he is partly right -- security, doping, finance -- and partly wrong.

Rogge does not know what the world will look like in 2021, much less 2025. No one can.

Twelve years after Moscow, here now in Buenos Aires, the record shows that Jacques Rogge absolutely brought stability and a steady hand.

"I'm wary of pompous words and big declarations and big descriptions," Rogge said. "I did my duty. I did what I had to do. If it has benefitted the IOC, I'm happy."

Now the IOC needs more. It needs a president with the vision thing, someone with creativity, resource and imagination to engage with a world that wants more from the IOC -- a world that is changing, and changing fast.

Doing one's duty is absolutely admirable, and not to be diminished. Of course, the IOC still needs stability. But there is more, so much more, that can be done. That is what is on the table, and nothing less, as election season gets going here in Buenos Aires.